Managing Partner & Owner of L’Artusi, b’artusi, Via Porta & L’Artusi Supper Club

My time at Gramercy Tavern was about getting my MBA in Hospitality. Opening L’Artusi in 2008 as the GM was about leading an opening and seeing a non-Danny Meyer way of running a restaurant. Working as NYC Area Director for Shake Shack was about seeing fast casual, seeing rapid growth, seeing and learning replicable systems and working within a “corporate” structure. Coming back to L’Artusi was about learning to be an owner.

Maintaining a health work/life balance is about determining what your priorities are and being confident in them.

To help do my job, I look towards Resy, Toast, 7shifts, Gusto, and DoorDash.

COVID forced us to think about our business a lot differently for our team. Our business expansion from just having L’Artusi to opening b’artusi, Via Porta and L’Artusi Supper Club were all things that were born out of the pandemic.

It was really cool to have been part of the management team at Gramercy Tavern when we won the James Beard Award for Most Outstanding Restaurant in the country. That was a huge team effort. I think I’m still hungover from the after party!

I can’t do my job without my phone and I hate it. (LOL)

I have a large sense of pride in doing things the “right way.” I feel an overwhelming obligation to run fiscally sound businesses for my employees. We have close to 200 employees that all need to provide for their families, put themselves through school, send money back home... It’s my responsibility to ensure they can thrive, get raises, get hours, attain bonuses. I enjoy being the person that creates an environment where that many people can support themselves and their families.

I think about diversity a bit differently. Because we are in restaurants in NYC, we are always going to have a diverse team in terms of race, religion, sexual orientation and that’s obviously a huge benefit but I think about diversity in terms of promotion from within vs outside hire. You have to have continuity with employees for many reasons, but if you always just promote from within, your team will have tunnel vision and be fearful of any small change. If you only hire from the outside, you lose any sort of thread of culture, it makes the guests uncomfortable and requires a TON of training. As a result, I really try to be diverse and intentional with my hiring/promoting in terms of internal promote vs. outside hire.

There were two catalysts that led me to pivot my career. The first was working at Shake Shack. Up until that point, I had only worked in full service-fine dining. After six years at the Shack, I went back to L’Artusi and changed almost everything I had set up originally when we opened. None of it was guest-facing. In fact, my north star was “none of these changes can be seen by guests.” We just got smarter and better around the business side of things. The second was COVID. That changed everything and forced all of us to be good at hitting the curveball. It also showed me how much people wanted to be part of our brand and gave me the confidence to expand.

I probably knew this profession was right for me from the moment I was washing dishes at my uncle’s restaurant at 14—though I’m not sure I realized it at the time! I just loved the camaraderie, the “see task, do task” nature of a shift and while I couldn’t articulate it at the time, there was something wonderful about the fact that our job was to show people a good time with food and drink. We were dealing with people that were out because they wanted to have a good time and it was our job to facilitate that. In contrast, my father was a lawyer and the people he was dealing with were generally in trouble or under some sort of stress. There’s a huge difference there.